~ Blog for the Daggre forecasting team

Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?

Below is a video from 2009 in which Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an applied game theorist at NYU, discusses the power of predictive models and their implications — particularly as it relates to Iran.

The New York Times had an article on Bueno de Mesquita that same year:

For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did…

[H]e has published a large number of startlingly precise predictions that turned out to be accurate, many of them in peer-reviewed academic journals. For example, five years before Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, Bueno de Mesquita predicted in the journal PS that Khomeini would be succeeded by Ali Khamenei (which he was), who himself would be succeeded by a then-less-well-known cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (which he may well be). Last year, he forecast when President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan would be forced out of office and was accurate to within a month. In “The Predictioneer’s Game,” a book coming out next month that was written for a popular audience, Bueno de Mesquita offers dozens more stories of his forecasts. And as for Iran’s bomb?

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

4 thoughts on “Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?”

Very interesting. This is the first TED Talk in awhile that I’ve watched all the way through.

While I do believe that political systems are rational in the long-term… I am not as convinced as is Bueno de Mesquita that individual human beings operate through rational choice theory and are, consequently, rational self-and-mutual-benefit maximizers

I think this the rational choice theory especially suffers when weighed down by the gravity of ideological convictions.

For instance, ideology seems to overpower rationality insofar as Iranian political power structures advance nuclear-research brinksmanship despite the world’s focus on it; and, further, that the particular stripe of Iranian Shia Islamism may deform their decision-making to be consistent with their religious beliefs. They may be internally consistent within their belief system, but does that amount to rational maximation? I don’t know. I recognize there are different schools of thought and power structures in Iran (i.e., the quiet mullahs).

Also, a side note to show I’m generous and not biased, American Democrats and Republicans also allow party ideology, tradition, or “towing the party line” to influence decision-making. Straying from the party line can damage one’s career trajectory in some machines.

I suppose the model accounts for that anyway, but it’s not as though Iran has the same kind of open, verifiable systems of primary party elections.

“A string of aggressive gestures by Iran this week — assassination attempts on Israelis living abroad that were attributed to Tehran, renewed posturing over its nuclear program and fresh threats of economic retaliation — suggest that Iranian leaders are responding frantically, and with increasing unpredictability, to the tightening of sanctions by the West.”

Unpredictability.

Well, according to The NY Times anyway. That is… unless frantic posturing and chest-pounding are what is to be predicted given that “the intentions of Iran’s divided leadership are notoriously difficult to divine.”

That’s a separate question as to whether they will advance to get enough weapons grade material, of course.

This is the kind of ratonal analysis I like in predictive models. Two years later, two thoughts on the potential failure of this analysis strike me – his influence model leaves out the kind of chess gamemanship of decision making that comes from the leaders attempt to follow factual trends, has Iran yielded on producing nuclear materials at excessive rates despite setbacks? No. Does the irrational response heighten and the card playing odds increase with pressure? Yes.

And a factor, with its own likely bluff, but unpredictability, of Israel striking at the nuclear sites and discussion of that threat flowing now, moreso – gives serious pause that the facts are leading towards an inevitable attempt to build the bomb.

One thing unaccounted for, I think in this equation, despite the internal buffers on going beyond yielding nuclear materials, is that once you achieve the bomb, and etst it, and announce it to the world, its game over. You no longer strike the snake becuase the snake can strike back.

The public in iran gets a positive lift in opinion of Irans rightness and strength in having the bomb. It becomes a righteous cause. They support it wholeheartedly at that point of having it.

That is… unless frantic posturing and chest-pounding are what is to be predicted given that “the intentions of Iran’s divided leadership are notoriously difficult to divine.”

It sounds like a very reasonable prediction — that leaders would become more frantic and unpredictable under tight sanctions — but how would we define, ahead of time, what counted as evidence? And indeed as you note, what does becoming more unpredictable mean?

I like that IARPA is forcing us to be measurable. I’d also like to think about how to test forecasts of hidden variables; the mass of the Higgs boson can only be measured indirectly and noisily, but over time it should enough to favor some theories over others.